Edward Lear becomes a Writer of Nonsense

Edward Lear, who published comic poetry and limericks in the 1840s, did not begin to put on paper what has become known as his nonsense verse until the late 1860s. According to his biographer, we do not know when he began to write the kind of work for which he is famous.

Occasionally he mentioned in his diary that he had just
written a new song or an alphabet, but generally we have to go
by the earliest surviving manuscript copy that he made to give
dway to his friends, and this could have been made days or even
years after he had written the song. He "sang nonsense for the
children" as far back as September 1860, seven years before the
earliest of his nonsense songs appeared in manuscript form to be
given away. . . . The earliest mention of anything more than limericks
was in February 1865 when he wrote "The Story of the Seven
Families from Lake Pipple-popple." In August 1866 came "Mr
Lear, the Polly and the Pussybite," in December 1867 "The Owl
and the Pussy-cat." By 1869 copies of other nonsense songs were in
existence, and at the end of 1870 Nonsense Songs, Stones, Botany and Alphabets was published. [222/223]

Anyone interested in the history of children's literature or nonsense verse would like to know about the literary relations between Lear and Lewis Carroll. Unfortunately, although they probably read each other's books, neither man ever mentioned the other author or his work. As Noakes points out, Alice in Wonderland saw publication in 1865,

and the only nonsense we know for
certain that Lear had written before then were the limericks and
the "History of the Seven Families." Without this story it would
have seemed likely that it was from Alice in Wonderland that Lear realised how much larger was the field of nonsense over which he could roam, for in Alice he would have discovered a new world of strangeness — the caterpillar smoking his hookah, the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, the game of croquet played with
flamingoes and hedgehogs and the sad sad Mock Turthe with his
Lobster Quadrille. But five months earlier — after Alice had been
written but before it was published — Lear himself had created the
Land of Gramblamble, the Lake Pipple-popple, Soffsky-Poffsky
trees, the Plumpudding Flea, the Clangle-Wangle, the blue Bosswoss, the gardens full of Goose-berry bushes and Tiggory-trees. And
so it really does seem that these two men were at this stage creating
their nonsense at the same time but quite independently. [225]

Noakes classifies Lear's nonsense into "three overlapping groups," the first of which often has humor:

The happy and
inconsequential. . . . limericks, the botany, the cookery,
the alphabets and the nonsense he put into letters to amuse his
friends.

"stories, in both prose and verse, nearly always of wandering and travel, and either with happy endings — 'The Owl and the Pussy-cat', 'The Duck and the Kangaroo' — or sad endings which don't worry us for they are pure nonsense — 'The Story of thie Seven Families from the Lake Pipple-popple'."

"Verses which express Lear's deep personal feelings,
written no longer for children but for himself . . . songs like 'The
Pelican Chorus' [and] . . . 'The Dong with the Luminous Nose.' . . . Again they are songs of wandering, but now emphasis is on
looking back to a time of happiness that has gone for ever, or
wandering grief-stricken like Demeter in search of Persephone,
seeking someone who in Lear's songs will never return. In fact,
his development as a nonsense writer is increasingly away from
pure nonsense into sad and moving poetry." [226]

In other words, when Lear writes as a nonsense poet he acts like a true Victorian, inventing or further developing a literary form that permits him to draw upon his most private experience for a public purpose. Like the dramatic monologues of Tennyson and Browning, and like the multiple voices of In Memoriam, Lear's nonsense acts as a means of shielded expression of intensely personal concerns.

References

Noakes, Vivien. Edward Lear, The Life of a Wanderer. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1968.